Oil Drilling Platform in the Gulf of Mexico

Bonny Schumaker, cofounder of the nonprofit On Wings of Care, flies over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill area every few weeks to survey for wildlife -- and on April 6, 2012, when this picture was taken, she was pleasantly surprised. "We were pleased to see very few of the surface oil slicks we've seen on every previous flight for the past nearly two years," she wrote on her blog. "Yes, there are still isolated lines and bands of sheen out in the Macondo area. But -- starting about 15-20 miles off shore, we found blue water, some of it no longer visibly tainted with oil. And that was a relief."